Eleven’s first demo day in Sofia, getting ready for London

Mark your calendar: Eleven’s demo day in London is on the 23rd of Jaunary 2013.

Last week saw a big milestone for Eleven, and the whole Southeast European region, as the first regional accelerator Demo Day took place, at the Eleven Roof in Sofia, Bulgaria.

With over a 100 attendees, including most local tech execs and angels, and a couple of regionally active VCs, Eleven’s eleven teams had a first real try at showing their tools and pitching to investors.

This is the first of two Demo Days for Eleven: the next one is coming up on January 23 at Google Campus in London. Some of the teams may even get luckier, and go to Mountain View to pitch at Google HQ during Eleven’s US Demo Day next year.

From the point of view of running Eleven, it’s awesome to see the huge progress that our teams made in the past couple of months. The first batch of any accelerator programme are always the few and the brave, because a freshly launched fund is a startup of its own.

Apart from the progress that the teams made, and the crucial feedback that they got to make their next appearance, in London next month, much stronger than last week’s in Sofia, it was also amazing to see investors and serial tech entrepreneurs coming to Sofia to witness a local Demo Day. We’re really happy to be among the first to put this region on the startup map.

As for the lessons learned, probably the most relevant one is to keep focusing on facilitating a great atmosphere, and on providing pitch practice. Because our program is based on heavy mentorship from our support network, including our partners at Google and Springboard, teams generally hook up with the mentors that are relevant for them, either from the tech or business side. For the accelerator team, our job is to work with the teams to make sure all funding and other legal formalities are taken care of, to provide a great place where the teams can work and learn from mentors and each other, and to help them improve their pitching performance, so they can take their startup to new horizons post-Eleven.

As we’re preparing to take it all to a totally new level in 2013, here is an overview of Eleven’s teams and their pitches at the first Demo Day: